SOVIET PEACE CHARADE IS LESS THAN CONVINCING

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: May 16, 1982

MOSCOW—
When the Rev. Billy Graham departed last week it seemed clear that his sojourn here would be remembered in the West mainly for his observations about the degree of religious freedom he found during his six-day stay. But the value of his visit for the Kremlin probably lay less in the evangelist's generous view of the state-controlled churches than in his attendance at a conference promoting the Soviet ''peace'' campaign, a curious bowdlerization of the movement against nuclear weapons that has been gathering momentum in the West.

Though the forms the Soviet movement has adopted are a deft facsimile of its Western counterparts, only the most credulous could equate them. The Kremlin campaign has its rallies and its slogans, and its polemicists have shown understanding of the oral and spiritual concerns that underpin Western antinuclear protests. But there is nothing impartial about the Soviet version, no propensity to look for fault at home. As in everything of consequence in Soviet life, the Kremlin has imposed its monopoly.

American clerics, who remained at the conference after Mr. Graham left, fought successfully for an amendment to its communique that added an approving reference to President Reagan's agreement to open strategic arms talks to the otherwise pro-Soviet text. But the concession seemed unlikely to perturb the Russians, who seem wellorganized to keep the peace issue running their way; elaborate peace programs have been a staple of Soviet foreign policy since Lenin. The current Soviet peace committee apparatus was established in 1950 and the committee has served as a conduit for Soviet influence in the World Peace Council in Helsinki, a faithful supporter of Soviet positions. With the advent of the Reagan Administration and the resurgence of the nuclear issue in Western European politics, the committee has assumed new importance.

Its recently named chairman is 73-year-old Yuri A. Zhukov, a senior Pravda commentator who presides in a shiny new steel-and-glass headquarters complete with conference hall, film theater and a staff of 100. It operates 120 branches whose reach can be judged by their success in obtaining 180 million signatures in the 1976 ''Stockholm appeal'' for an end to the arms race, and by the recent marshaling of six million letters to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from young Russians protesting plans to deploy new American missiles in Europe. The committee budget comes from popular contributions and activities such as the ''peace shifts'' that were worked in thousands of factories last weekend to mark the 37th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Helping Peace Movements Along

Demonstrating its total control, the peace committee held protest meetings and rallies last week and was able to announce in advance how many people would attend each event - for example, ''a meeting with antiwar slogans in Brest Fortress -40,000 people.'' To nobody's surprise, the meetings produced ''spontaneous'' denunciations of President Reagan's policies on nuclear missiles, the neutron bomb and chemical weapons, which could have been clipped from Pravda.

The committee publishes no accounts, but some of its largesse evidently has been bestowed on Europeans opposing the Western alliance plan to deploy new missiles as a counterbalance to Soviet SS-20's. Moscow has ridiculed President Reagan and NATO Secretary General Joseph Luns for suggesting the link, but a Norwegian group, Art for Peace, acknowledged receiving Soviet financial help for a ''peace meeting'' last year and the Danish representative on the World Peace Council came under investigation after $45,000 was found hidden in a cupboard in his home. A Soviet diplomat in Copenhagen was declared persona non grata for activities that included contacts with the Danish peace campaign and a Tass correspondent was expelled from Holland for his contacts with the Dutch antinuclear movement.

The Soviet agents' help probably amounts to little more than a jog in the direction that the protestors would have gone anyway. More intriguing is Mr. Zhukov's assertion that his committee is independent of the Soviet Government. That its policies happen to be identical with the Kremlin's, he said, is no wonder, since it is the Soviet leadership that is ''objectively'' pushing for peace.

Similar circular arguments were expressed in an October 1980 article in Voprosy Filosofii, a Soviet Academy of Sciences journal, by Maj. Gen. Arsenii F. Milovidov, dean of philosophy at the Lenin Military-Political Academy. He argued that nuclear missiles were ''fearsome weapons of war'' in imperialist hands but ''a shield for peace'' in the Communist armory.

Of late, there have been signs of anxiety that the emphasis on peace may have gone too far, and that encouragement of European protests could backfire by stimulating similar manifestations in Moscow. How unwelcome that would be was demonstrated last month when European visitors who attempted to unfurl a disarmament banner in Red Square were thrown to the ground by K.G.B. security agents and hauled off for interrogation.

Kremlin worries that popular feelings may yet erupt have shown up in warnings about what the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya called ''toothless pacifism.'' The newspaper did not have to explain that in parks in Moscow and other Soviet cities, young people gather with guitars and sing peace songs, including some borrowed from the American antiwar movement of the 1960's. In a booklet entitled ''Always Ready to Defend the Fatherland,'' Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, chief of staff of the armed forces, lamented that two generations of Soviet people have grown up since World War II ''not knowing what war is'' and consequently adopting ''easy-going attitudes and carelessness.'' Such attitudes, the marshal said, were ''a dangerous phenomenon, fraught with grave consequences'' that should be eradicated by the party and the Young Communist League by all possible means.